: expertise :

Clients enjoy working with me because of my unique insights and fresh perspectives on how people use mobile devices to interact with each other and the world, what data they create, and how this affects products, brands, and marketing.

My expertise comes from a combination of consulting experience, academic research, corporate R&D, performing arts, and living in Europe, Asia, and the US.

As the Chief Scientist at Amazon.com I worked with Jeff Bezos and applied academic insights to improve recommendations and user experience, as well as helped create a customer-centric culture and data strategy.

With clients, we navigate the evolving landscape of consumer behavior and channel the exploding torrent of user data to identify new opportunities and marketing strategies. The results of my work inform the design of innovative products, inspire visionary business models, and change the way leaders perceive the social data revolution.

Through the years I have had the privilege of speaking at conferences and organizing workshops for companies ranging from startups to multinationals including GE, Lufthansa, Nokia, Symantec and Thomson Reuters. I work with senior management as well as marketing and product development teams to help them ask the right questions, develop relevant frameworks, and design data strategies that result in measurable impact on the business.

Dreaming up new companies is not terribly difficult: at the conference Andreas Weigend, the founder of Social Data Lab, came up with the idea of “another person’s hat”; a product that allows you to don the digital identity of, say, an Islamic fundamentalist and see what the world looks like through his eyes.

: focus areas :

Extracting Value From Existing Data

Multiple and disparate sources create many different types of data: activities within the organization, search and traffic on the web, sensor information from mobile devices, response behavior in email and IM, relationships on social networks, and many more types of mobile and social data. I help companies prioritize their efforts, construct hypotheses, extract insights, and create value from this data. The social data revolution now allows companies to go beyond dead data, to extract more actionable insights from live data that come from well-designed experiments under varying conditions, or be explicitly contributed by users.

The PHAME Framework

Going beyond traditional data mining, the PHAME framework -- Problem, Hypotheses, Actions, Metrics, and Experiments -- is key to Amazon's continuous customer-centric innovation. I conduct workshops for clients that apply this framework to their organization including product development and marketing.

Getting Customers to Create New Data: Incentive Design

Understanding how your customers behave and make decisions is critical to designing powerful incentives. At its essence, the social data revolution provides a microscope into what really matters to the individual customer. People now create and share data if they expect to gain some direct benefits including getting attention from people they are interested in. I leverage the underlying principles of human behavior to help companies design incentives that work.

Multichannel Engagement

Customers have become fluid in using whichever channel fits best their current needs in a given situation. They make purchasing decisions wherever they are with whatever relevant information they can find. I help companies understand the emerging communication behavior across multiple channels. Together we develop strategies for visionary customer interactions.